Thing about this one is people don't get to say "well they were mentally disturbed and we just need to make sure people like that don't get guns". This wasn't a mentally ill individual deliberately attacking innocents, it was (having read several news stories so far, this article itself doesn't say it) an out and out gunfight between two armed people in a public place...

Ridiculous on the surface, but schools generally don't act without a complaint and don't suspend for talk of playing with toys.

It sounds like parental/school overreaction to me. Instead of sitting the kid who complained down and explaining that playing with toys is different than what happened at Sandy Hook, like a rational person would, they immediately jumped to "OMG THREAT!!!" What pushes it over the line to straight up absurd is the suspension for a "terroristic threat". That's lolworthy.

I used to play cowboys & indians during recess in grade school. I can only imagine how that would fly today.

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Thing about this one is people don't get to say "well they were mentally disturbed and we just need to make sure people like that don't get guns". This wasn't a mentally ill individual deliberately attacking innocents, it was (having read several news stories so far, this article itself doesn't say it) an out and out gunfight between two armed people in a public place...

Maybe one of them was going to start a shooting spree and the other person was shooting at him to make him stop. Texas is a state with high gun ownership, and people do carry guns to prevent crime, so this could have been a shooting-prevention shooting.

Or it could just be a couple of under-endowed hotheads proving how manly they are.

Fivelives wrote:It sounds like parental/school overreaction to me. Instead of sitting the kid who complained down and explaining that playing with toys is different than what happened at Sandy Hook, like a rational person would, they immediately jumped to "OMG THREAT!!!" What pushes it over the line to straight up absurd is the suspension for a "terroristic threat". That's lolworthy.

I used to play cowboys & indians during recess in grade school. I can only imagine how that would fly today.

It pretty much all hinges on what the complaining kid told his/her parents. Crying kids are practically unintelligible anyway, so if all the parents got was "Becky" (or whoever) and "gun" and "shoot us" and "don't want to die", then in the wake of Sandy Hook parents could have a freak-out. Depends on the kid, what she told them, and the parents and how paranoid they are.

Look, it's ridiculous to me that the US spent so much on Security Theater in the wake of 9/11 when a few beagles could have done a batter and less intrusive job, so my estimation of the rationality of people in the wake of horrific acts is not overly high.

Koatanga wrote:Ridiculous on the surface, but schools generally don't act without a complaint and don't suspend for talk of playing with toys.

We're talking about 5-year-olds here, so it's entirely possible one little girl who heard about the recent shootings could have thought that a Hello Kittle Bubble Gun could have killed her. Absurd to you and I, but I have a 7-year-old daughter, and around 5 years old she had serious concerns that absurd things would kill her.

This is to the extent that she would cry about them until we explained how silly she was being. She's not weird or anything, just a normal well-adjusted, imaginative, bright kid. She heard about a meteor wiping out the dinosaurs, so talk of a meteor shower meant imminent death to her.

So now imagine some 5-year-old girl going home to mom and dad, upset that another girl was going to shoot her with a gun and kill her like the kids in Sandy Hook. The parents would flip out and contact the school at once, and the school would have to take every precaution to assure they didn't have a Sandy Hook incident, because if they ignored it and an incident happened, they would be liable.

So this whole things looks absurd to us, but if that's the way the scenario went down, I can easily see it happening as reported.

And I completely agree with you in this regard. However (and fuck me for not being able to find the other articles), I've also read that it wasn't even a student complaint at all, just a parent who overheard and complained. Ok, fine, I can even live with that - a parent being parent and all. What bothers me about the whole thing is that, after the required session with the school counselor who said she doesn't have the disposition for "terroristic threats", after determining there was no gun (toy or otherwise) on the girl's person, at school, or at home, instead of saying, "Ok, we're sorry for the hoops, but we had to do this," and clearing her record and lifting the suspension - I'm bothered that they still suspended her and have now marked her as "making harmful threats." What harmful threat was she making? Blowing bubbles?

There's a dozen different ways they could have handled that. Once everything was done, she's still labelled as a troublemaker, this time without cause.

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Koatanga wrote:Or it could just be a couple of under-endowed hotheads proving how manly they are.

The problem is that america, as a society, seems not to be mature enough to solve conflict without either people going to therapy over it, or losing their shit and shoot people

Honestly, I think it's no better elsewhere - we as a species are not mature enough to be responsible for more than our monkeysphere. Only thing is, it's something different elsewhere. It can be depression, suicide, social isolation. You just had the right elements for it to be shootings.

When that day comes, seek all the light and wonder of this world, and fight.

Koatanga wrote:Or it could just be a couple of under-endowed hotheads proving how manly they are.

The problem is that america, as a society, seems not to be mature enough to solve conflict without either people going to therapy over it, or losing their shit and shoot people

Honestly, I think it's no better elsewhere - we as a species are not mature enough to be responsible for more than our monkeysphere. Only thing is, it's something different elsewhere. It can be depression, suicide, social isolation. You just had the right elements for it to be shootings.

I think the difference is that if I get pissed off at someone and hit him with a baseball bat, his odds of survival are greater than if I was to get pissed off and hit him with a bullet.

I personally think New Zealand has a reasonably rational approach toward gun control - the basic firearms license allows you to own sporting rifles and shotguns, then you have to get additional qualifications for "military-style semi-automatics" or pistols that have more stringent requirements than the basic firearms license.

Possession of firearms in anticipation of using it for self-defense is prohibited, but using a firearm for self-defense is legal under certain circumstances, and each case is reviewed on its own merits. Firearms can be confiscated and license revoked if the license holder is the subject of a domestic violence charge.

It seems to work pretty well. Incidents of gun crime are pretty rare, although they still happen.

However, we enjoy a high standard of living and are usually among the top countries in the world in which to live and do business. The US, as a declining superpower, has far more problems affecting its population, and a lot more pressure building up on its people. National debt, wars, unemployment, foreclosures, declining property values - it all adds up to a level of stress that is more likely to cause people to break.

The administrators are the gatekeepers, the concerns of emotional parents and children ought to meet common sense when they are elevated to that level. Such heavy handed punishments (that are potentially far more harmful than the incident itself) require a certain amount of due diligence and scrutiny. There's no way that occurred in this case. The administrators quite clearly failed.

Fridmarr wrote:The administrators are the gatekeepers, the concerns of emotional parents and children ought to meet common sense when they are elevated to that level. Such heavy handed punishments (that are potentially far more harmful than the incident itself) require a certain amount of due diligence and scrutiny. There's no way that occurred in this case. The administrators quite clearly failed.

If it's like most bureaucratic organisations, the admins will have district policy by which they must abide. I would think that at this particularly sensitive time, those policies would be followed to the letter by people whose main concern is covering their asses.

Again, the implementation of those policies has to meet up with common sense. Otherwise you end up calling a 5 year old girl with a toy full of soapy water, a terrorist. The result is far more harmful to the school, the administration, and especially the children that they are supposed to be serving than the incident itself. There's no excuse, none.

Reminds me of something that happened after I joined the school district where I work at. I had to repair a computer at a self-contained room, where a bunch of high school kids with emotional issues were grouped together, supposedly to be taken care of by specialized teachers...

Well, I get there and its basically your average zoo cage filled with shit-flinging monkeys... kids not following the teachers' directives, yelling obscenities, you name it... but for one kid that was actually on his designated desk and writing down whatever the poor teacher was try teach...

But a security guard comes into the room, and takes the kid that was actually doing something away... because he was high...

I understand that they needed to do something about the kid that was high, but at the same time, I facepalmed because he was the only one that was actually following instructions, whereas the ones doing whatever they wanted had no repercussions whatsoever...

so by going along with the joke, and being a cool teacher (and reminding me of some of my favorite teachers) she is getting fired...

Brekkie:Tanks are like shitty DPS. And healers are like REALLY distracted DPSAmirya:Why yes, your penis is longer than his because you hit 30k dps in the first 10 seconds. But guess what? That raid boss has a dick bigger than your ego. Flex:I don't make mistakes. I execute carefully planned strategic group wipes.Levie:(in /g) It's weird, I have a collar and I dont know where I got it from, Worgen are kinky!Levie:Drunk Lev goes and does what he pleases just to annoy sober Lev.Sagara:You see, you need to *spread* the bun before you insert the hot dog.

Sounds like, from the early part of the article, the issue is not the duct tape but the fact she posted a picture of her students online, and whether that violates their privacy. Presumably the law would say the parents need to agree to something like that.

so by going along with the joke, and being a cool teacher (and reminding me of some of my favorite teachers) she is getting fired...

Color me unphased by it. maybe a privacy violation? Maybe?

But then, when I was a kid, I once bugged my father so much that he agreed to play cowboys and indians with me. He wanted to be the indians. After a few minutes, He "Caught me", and I was to be burned at the stake. So he duct taped me to a chair, and said "Now, I'm going to go get wood!" I, super excited sat there, and sat there, and sat there, while my father went to the garage to get some work done. When my mother came home from the grocery store (oh.... 30-45mins later? I don't know, I was like 6) there I sat, duct taped to a chair, in the dining room.

I'll never forget the look on her face as she said:

"Where. Is. YOUR FATHER.?!"

I said

"looking for wood! He's going to burn me at the stake! We're playing Cowboys and Indians!"

she put the armload of groceries down, walked through the dining room (leaving me duct taped to the chair), out the back door, and into the garage. I could hear her screaming at him from in the house. I don't remember how long I sat there after that, but I couldn't understand for the longest time what she was so angry about. I had fun, and it's now a pretty funny thing to look back on. I was a crazy rambunctious kid.

Fridmarr wrote:Again, the implementation of those policies has to meet up with common sense. Otherwise you end up calling a 5 year old girl with a toy full of soapy water, a terrorist. The result is far more harmful to the school, the administration, and especially the children that they are supposed to be serving than the incident itself. There's no excuse, none.

We don't know the circumstances of it. For all we know, the school administration received a memo from the district office ordering a zero-tolerance policy for mention of shooting or using guns. In that case, the administration would have no choice but to abide by that policy as long as a parent made a statement that such a threat took place. They wouldn't have choice in the matter.

If that girl goes nuts when she's 13 and shoots up a school, all eyes will go back to a parent complaint filed in 2013 that foreshadowed the action, and the school admins would be held liable for not taking action. Considering the lawsuits filed against the Sandy Hook school, I think it is entirely reasonable that the district would order school admins to take things very seriously indeed.

I don't think it's reasonable for us to assume that school administrators are completely incompetent to the extent they would, on their own, suspend a girl for "threatening" to make soap bubbles. I think it is reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt that there was some overriding policy or additional facts that we don't know that promoted their action.

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You're right we only have one side. If circumstances change around the incident itself then maybe there is some wiggle room. Beyond that though, everything else you said is nonsense.

A 5 year old girl was allegedly suspended from school for 10 days (making it so she can not transfer, because the school refuses to clear her record), called a terrorist by the school, and forced to undergo a psychiatric exam, for apparently describing how she plays with a toy in common vernacular that the school district chose to take it in a ridiculous manner. If that's true, it's a failure plain and simple.

I'm curious if the district allows their basketball teams to "shoot" baskets or their football team to line up in the "shotgun" formation (actually I have first hand knowledge from my high schools days that they do use that formation in football, though I have no clue what they call it). Doesn't that violate this absurd standard too? After all, shooting a basketball is far more dangerous than shooting soap bubbles.

Koatanga wrote:Considering the lawsuits filed against the Sandy Hook school, I think it is entirely reasonable that the district would order school admins to take things very seriously indeed.

First of all CYA isn't an excuse to treat a child in such a way, nor an excuse to undermine your own authority and shake the public confidence of your competency, which was the obvious fallout over this. Secondly, taking something seriously means you perform your due diligence and make a proper assessment of the situation, you don't translate this alleged conversation into a terrorist threat. If the current facts hold, it's hard to imagine that an assessment was done in a serious manner.

I don't care about any sort of silly "zero tolerance" rule. If you're the principal and you believe that the rules are forcing you take this drastically unreasonable action, you escalate this to the board and/or the superintendent. If they make the choice, then its on them, either way it's an obvious failure by administrators at some level.

Again, I say "test for reasonableness". If what's reported is not reasonable behavior of grown adults, then it's likely there is more to the story that we have not heard.

To quote the article:

The superintendent's office for the Mount Carmel Area School District did issue a statement, stating that "by law we cannot officially comment on the specifics," while expressing confidence that the story circulating in the media "may not be consistent with the facts."

"When given the opportunity in the appropriate forum, we look forward to presenting information that will portray our school district in a more positive light," the school district said.

Koatanga wrote:Again, I say "test for reasonableness". If what's reported is not reasonable behavior of grown adults, then it's likely there is more to the story that we have not heard.

To quote the article:

The superintendent's office for the Mount Carmel Area School District did issue a statement, stating that "by law we cannot officially comment on the specifics," while expressing confidence that the story circulating in the media "may not be consistent with the facts."

"When given the opportunity in the appropriate forum, we look forward to presenting information that will portray our school district in a more positive light," the school district said.

My district has said pretty much thing when they screw up, and they have screwed up...

Koatanga wrote:Again, I say "test for reasonableness". If what's reported is not reasonable behavior of grown adults, then it's likely there is more to the story that we have not heard.

To quote the article:

The superintendent's office for the Mount Carmel Area School District did issue a statement, stating that "by law we cannot officially comment on the specifics," while expressing confidence that the story circulating in the media "may not be consistent with the facts."

"When given the opportunity in the appropriate forum, we look forward to presenting information that will portray our school district in a more positive light," the school district said.

If the kid's lawyer's story isn't accurate, then fair enough. The sort of procedural crap that you were arguing doesn't fly though.